But I don't want to rehearse the discourse on Eggleston, much of which is available online at the William Eggleston Trust site, where you can see the iconic images from the MoMA show, published as William Eggleston's Guide, and read John Szarkowski's introductory essay. This essay by Tom Weski, about another collection, Los Alamos, is also worthwhile.
The film grew out of the filmmaker's friendship with the photographer, and his obvious admiration for Eggleston's work. It's not a conventional artist's biopic, partly because of Almereyda's own artistic ambitions and desire for something more intimate, and partly because the subject himself isn't interested in talking about his work in any analytical way. In fact, Eggleston is so tight-lipped about his work that when he mumbles on camera, we're provided subtitles. It's unclear whether Eggleston refused to wear a mike (highly possible) or whether Almereyda wanted to pick up all the ambient sound, as part of his “snapshot” cinematic style (also highly possible), but in either case, Eggleston says very little in the film. Almereyda follows the photographer around as he shoots in the streets of a small town, or as he putters around his house, playing the piano or drawing, and getting sloshed.
This homage to Eggleston's own focus on the mundane, familiar corners of everyday life has mixed results:
The best part of the documentary for me is when Eggleston, accompanied by his son Winston (director of the Eggleston Trust), stops at an abandoned house in the middle of a country road to take pictures. The doors of the red sedan remain flung open throughout the shoot, and we see Eggleston moving around the exterior first, with camera in hand, stopping at the crudely painted For Sale sign on a piece of plywood. At 65, Eggleston is a tall, slightly built man, with a head of white hair, stooped posture, and at the time of filming, a limp in one leg, but in this extended scene, you can sense his energy and alertness, you can almost see his eyes darting around and devouring the details of the house as he adjusts his camera lens.
Eggleston goes inside the house, and again, we see him move quickly from room to room, from corner to corner, assessing and calculating before he bothers to click the shutter. Here, Almereyda intercuts shots of Eggleston taking a picture with shots of the printed photograph: process and product, the transformation of a thing into a particular vision of that thing. The editing is simple and satisfying in the way it gives the audience an illusion of immediate access to Eggleston's work. Like movie stills in film books but in reverse (to riff on C Bush's post from yesterday), the still photographs in the moving picture provide a glimpse into Eggleston's world, and imply a story of how a particular image came into being; they perform their indexical relationship to the thing photographed right before our eyes.
It's also in this scene that I noticed Eggleston's deliberateness and precision: he takes no more than a single shot of each part of the house before he moves on. Sometimes he raises the camera to his eyes as if to test the framing of the shot, but doesn't take the picture. Later in the film, we see him taking questions from an audience, and someone asks him about this economy of shots. Most photographers would take multiple shots, trying out different angles and framings and settings, and then later choose what to print from the contact sheets, but Eggleston says he sees no point in doing that. One shot is enough, he says, what would he do with five copies of the same thing? (Apparently, he also doesn't work from contact sheets.) He edits as he shoots, and watching him work, you understand what that might look like.
It's this kind of information about how the artist works, how they go about the task of making, that I look for in artist documentaries. I don't need the artist to explain what his work means (that's our job, isn't it?), or a bunch of talking heads to explain why this artist is one of the greatest ever, who forever changed the course of history. Context, biographical information, and critical reception are all interesting to learn about, of course, but this is stuff you can get elsewhere. If there's a film about a living artist, what intrigues me and what I want to see is how the artist goes about the daunting process of making art.
The best parts of Almereyda's film do that, but the worst parts are where the filmmaker tries to do with the film what Eggleston does in his photographs. Presumably trying to capture Eggleston in the “real world,” Almereyda includes long scenes of Eggleston at home and at a female companion's house, playing music and basically hanging out, like a child among his playthings. The voyeuristic, raw quality of this footage is meant to be revealing, and of course in some sense it is—we hear Eggleston's own musical compositions, for example—but as a piece of cinema, it comes off as boringly pretentious, affected in a way Eggleston's photographs are not.
Ultimately, the unevenness of the film is reflective of the fundamental tension between Almereyda's desire to understand Eggleston and his desire to emulate him, or maybe the difficulty of achieving understanding through emulation. Near the end of the film, we see Eggleston in what seems to be a booth at a diner being interviewed by the filmmaker off screen, who asks Eggleston about what he thinks his pictures might be about, what kinds of subject matter and themes he seems to be exploring. Eggleston refuses to play along, finally saying something to the effect of “I don't think you can follow up the pictures with words; I don't see any point in it.”
It seems Almereyda tries to go along with that at times, tries to let his moving images describe his subject; but his desire to make sense of his subject prevents him from staying silent. His voiceover narration explicitly voices this dilemma—“why not stay silent?”—but then goes on to analyze Eggleston's body of work and his own responses to it. His impulse is understandable, of course. But to the extent that the film is as much a document of Almereyda's filming as a documentary about Eggleston, it seems a record of a series of deflected attempts to get close to his elusive subject, leaving us to return to the photographs themselves. Which is perhaps as it should be.
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